How do I hide Sponsored Listings?

[callixto]

I HATE, I repeat HATE Sponsored Listings. They are ruining my eBay experience, and you can best believe that I will NEVER purchase a Sponsored item.

I want a way to turn them OFF. I do not want to see the same overpriced item at the top, middle, and bottom of every page of results, especially when I have specific sort criteria. What is the point of 'newly listed' or 'price low to high' if the first results are the Sponsored Listing? I guarantee you that seeing these same listings over and over is not going to weaken my resolve and make me want to purchase these random items. Au contraire, mon frère. Any seller that makes frequent use of Sponsored Listings is going to go on my blacklist. You people are the worst.

[lindyslucky]

I don't know think the people at ebay know what they are trying to be.

If they are trying to be like Amazon it's a lose right away. 

The sucess of Amazon is a once in a lifetime fluke. 

Im not sure it's good for our country's economy, but we use it. 

The world has changed dramatically since Ebay's inception twenty years ago.

Things seem to be much more cynical. More angry, more antagonistic.

We absolutely hate the adversity we feel dealing with ebay.

Yes, we would say the trust aspect is long gone.

The whole idea of dealing person to person has actively been discarded by Ebay, it seems. 

Leaving what? Seems like a lot of disappointed (bitter?) sellers.

And I'm a frustrated (attempted) buyer.

[7robbo1983]

The main thing is that sponsored listings are intrusive and counter-productive for the buyer. They often show up with the wrong search criteria - totally different than the search refinements I selected. I left eBay for many years and only to returned to purchase a computer - but am completely frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the search refinements. I check the box for SSD and i7 processor, but listings show up with HD and i5 processors, and the sponsored listings are way off base.

It's horrible.

[alexresistors]

Hi,

I understand your frustration and I feel the exact same way about "sponsored" Ebay listings.

I just called Ebay support and explained the issue, hopefully someone will understand and fix the problem by giving us the choice to hide sponsored listings from our search list.

It is normal and necessary the Ebay evolve & change but sometimes they take wrong decisions.   

Alex.

[eburtonlab]

@alexresistors 

Sellers are paying eBay to promote the sponsored listings by inserting them into favored positions in the search results -- or at least, they are paying eBay if those sponsored listings result in sales; those sellers will not be happy if eBay immediately turns around and makes it easy for users to hide those listings by simply checking a box.

Currently your best bet for avoiding the sponsored listings is likely the one outlined several times in this thread: installing Ad Block Plus in your desktop browser and unchecking "Allow Acceptable Ads" in the settings.

[renteddreams1960]

berserkerplanet

Thanks for the code. I too hate to see these "sponsored ads" when I'm searching for something specific.

[7robbo1983]

Sponsored listings are basically paid spam.

[7robbo1983]

THANK YOU!!!!!

[junglesupply]

I am just fine with sponsored listings in the initial default "Best Match" search, and I've seen some of these listings have a lot of sales and that's great. There's a lot of people who maybe experimentally stop by Ebay, they don't want to wade through pages of listings and oftentimes a sponsored listing has just what they're looking for, quick, and because of that, they make the purchase. This person might have otherwise got overwhelmed and/or just gone somewhere else.  That to me is a win for everyone.  They might be more likely to come back to Ebay and do a little bit more "digging" in future.

  There's a ton of product on this site, and people shop online in the first place oftentimes because of the ease and convenience, not everyone is out on a militant mission to sort for the best deal , scour pages of sometimes all-over-the-place photos and descriptions .  If the seller wants that volume of sales and wants to pay for that visual spot that's their business and obviously they'll decide if that is working for them.

However I think it's super counter productive to still have those same sponsored items at the top and bottom of the page after the shopper has changed the sorting on the top right to any of the other 5 options besides Best Match.  At that point they are wanting to refine their search, they're deciding they'd like to take a little more time to find what they're looking for, they've already decided what showed up wasn't what they were looking for , yet now these same items are stubbornly sticking and it gets super confusing and muddled real quick to suddenly find the prices all over the place, and realize you've seen the same items more than once as you've scrolled a couple pages, you wonder if you even went to the next page because you're seeing the same item or set of items pop up again, and the prices are not how you've sorted them, etc.

[mareks360]

berserkerplanet - Thank you so much !
One of the reasons I was buying primarily on E-Bay was that Amazon was cheating showing unrelated to my search items and also was not including shipping price into "sort by price" final result. For a long time E-Bay was honest and sorting items by price.
Then E-Bay started introducing these bloody Sponsored overpriced items in between cheaper items sorted by price. That is cheating and deception !
E-Bay did violate my trust by not allowing us to truly sort items by price.
When does Amazon & E-Bay learn that Customer Trust & Satisfaction is something you should not mess with and that is for their long term good business? Cheating and deception never pays off.
Alibaba has opened Aliexpress for Consumers in the USA and are selling items at half price of what EBay & Amazon sells (well it takes longer to deliver) but if they provide better shopping experience then people will start flocking away from EBay & Amazon. Competition is always Good for Consumers ! Duopoly will soon be over and Amazon & E-Bay will pay dearly for their ignorance, cheating & deception.
Thank you so much berserkerplanet for standing up for our Consumer Rights and providing this wonderful script. You should probably create an account people could donate for your work.
Google Ad Blocker installed was asking for at least $5 donation while it was doing nothing to block these Sponsored Ads on E-Bay in the middle "sort by price" listing.

[spoontoss]

Thank you! This worked perfectly. I was wondering why Ad Block Plus on Chrome wouldn't filter these options out? Derp.  

Just a quick add on that the sponsored listing will load for a quick second before disappearing. At least they do sometimes for me.  Cheers.

[tahuyahick]

I'm totally with you on this one. Just wasted an entire 3 minutes of my time getting more **bleep**-off over what appeared to be the ebay search engine interfering with my results - I had a item listing I found via Qwant, I then ran a search inside ebay for the same item, arranging the results by lowest price first. The very first result had a price that was much higher than what I had found using Qwant. I had forgotten to keep an eye out for that not-so-noticeable 'sponsored' at the top of each listing

When I run a search in order to verify that something I find does not have a lower price on another listing, I expect to at the very least have that first result show up as the first listing via ebay's own search engine

Add to this, I consider all 'sponsored listings' as just another form of junk mail, which in itself adds an unwanted burden on my household waste management

Ebay has made a solid profit off of the payments made by sellers in order to participate in this 'sponsored' promotional program. By the time someone finally figures out how to code a FireFox addon to block this **bleep**, Ebay will have made more than they will lose, and it wont cost them a dime to end this

So the practical reality is that it is left to the grassroots community of common people to find their own solutions

Simply attempting a word search on Ebay's search result pages, for the word 'sponsored' will fail, as the individual letters in this word have been crafted into nine separate links. ie - my web browser is treating these as nine separate words

I would have to run a page search capable of identifying nine individual letters located closely near each other in a single row, then use that to target the web page section representing the sponsored listing itself. At which point have that listing blocked by a adblocker, or at the very least highlighted so it stands out as a flagged listing

If anyone has any information on how to do this, I would like to know

Beyond this, it might be necessary to have a web page search always running in the background whenever on an ebay page, that evaluates the price results in any search. Or maybe an entire third-party search engine for all ebay listings which is capable of filtering out all ebay interferences

[eburtonlab]

@tahuyahick 

Techniques to filter sponsored listings are described earlier in this thread. The easiest way if you are using a desktop browser is to install Ad Block Plus and then uncheck the "Allow Acceptable Ads" setting. That will eliminate sponsored listings from your search.

The problem with that is eBay has changed the way that sponsored listings appear; previously the sponsored listing appeared in addition to the same non-sponsored ("organic") version of the listing. If you filtered the sponsored version, you were left with the organic version which sorted correctly (assuming it qualified for your search).

Now eBay no longer guarantees that the organic version of the listing will appear at all; in some cases only the sponsored version appears. If you filter the sponsored listings, you will miss those items completely. Which may be still worth doing, but you should be aware of the fact that you may miss those items.

[tahuyahick]

I already had AdBlock Plus, and already had the 'acceptable ads' setting unchecked. I still get the sponsored listings. Running Waterfox 56 in Win7. I might try standard FireFox and see if that gets a different result

[eburtonlab]

I may be mistaken -- it is possible that the Ad Block Plus method of unchecking the "Allow Acceptable Ads" no longer works. If so, I am sorry about that.

I had rechecked that option when eBay changed the sponsored listing behavior, but now that I uncheck it again, I am still seeing the sponsored Ads.

I will reboot my machine and try a few things to see if I can figure out what happened.

[wideriverfive]

You are a lifesaver. Thanks for doing what the corporate board running the site into the ground refuses to do -- make eBay work for the small-time users whose interest made it last two decades.

That said, everyone buy your final round of collectibles and short now, because a poorly navigable Amazon clone isn't going to make it many more years.